Corporate report

Chair's newsletter July 2023

Published 27 July 2023

Dear Colleague,

I wanted to update you on the recent work of the SSRO and our plans to work with you in the coming months.  Our focus has been on looking ahead as we finalised our Corporate Plan for 2023-2026. The plan sets out our objectives and work programme, an overview of our performance in 2022/23 and key risk factors.

With pressure on government finances, defence procurement is taking place within an increasingly challenging environment. As government and industry come together to overcome these challenges, legislative changes are also being introduced to improve the operation of the single source regime.

These changes provide an opportunity for the SSRO, with the input of stakeholders, to take forward the role it can play in enabling improvements to the operation of the single source regulatory framework.  This will better equip both the Ministry of Defence and the UK defence industry to deliver government policy successfully and meet the needs of our armed forces.

For our part, we have reviewed our own plans and approach, recognising that by proactively playing our role, working with and alongside our stakeholders, the SSRO can both support and drive improvements in procurement and contract management.

New Chief Executive

We’re very happy to welcome John Russell as SSRO’s new Chief Executive. John took up his post on 1 July 2023. He joins the SSRO from Ofwat, where he was a Senior Director.

John and I recently attended the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford, which whilst very wet and windy, provided a great opportunity to meet some of our stakeholders face to face and hear views on how the SSRO can develop to best meet the challenges of the future. We look forward to meeting more of you over the next few months whilst John deepens his understanding of the defence procurement landscape.

In May we said goodbye to Neil Swift, SSRO’s previous Chief Executive. Neil had been with the SSRO for eight years and played an instrumental role in establishing and developing the organisation. I would personally like to thank Neil for his expertise and support and wish him well in the future.

Upcoming work and priorities

Our immediate priority is to support industry and the MOD, now and as the reforms to the regulatory framework set out in the Procurement Bill are implemented in spring 2024. We will engage directly with you over the coming months as we develop our response to the legislative changes, drawing on your expertise in doing so. This will include updates and developments to both our statutory guidance and the DefCARS system.

Working with you on these priorities will help build a better understanding of the regime amongst all stakeholders. We will continue to promote better data utilisation which, together with our other work, will help drive improvements in procurement and contract management. To encourage this, we are engaging directly with selected MOD teams, to identify data users and get a better understanding of their needs by providing hands-on support on using DefCARS.

We continue to improve our understanding of user needs and issues arising and create opportunities to discuss how we can ensure the regime supports you. For example, we are driving speedier issue resolution through pre-referral engagement and our commitment to making it easier for the MOD and contractors to make referrals.

And finally, I’m grateful to all who supported our workshop to take forward the outcome of our capability review. We are now growing the team’s skills through access to the MOD’s commercial pathway training alongside a renewed focus on accessing specialist and experienced resource. Thank you to those industry stakeholders who have already offered the possibility of reciprocal placements to support guidance development – we would welcome further discussions as we progress similar conversations with the MOD.

Publications

Alongside the development of the Corporate Plan we have published revised guidance on baseline profit rates and inflation, responses to commonly asked queries and refreshed our stakeholder engagement strategy. We also published our annual statistics bulletin and launched a consultation on the findings of Phase 1 of our review of the Baseline Profit Rate Activity Types. The consultation runs until Thursday 10 August 2023 and I would encourage you to respond to this.

Follow our LinkedIn page for the latest news and updates about our work.

Office move

We recently bid farewell to Finlaison House and have moved to government offices in Whitehall in June 2023.  Our new address is:

100 Parliament Street, London, SW1A 2BQ

Enjoy the rest of the summer.

Best wishes,

Hannah Nixon